Twas the night before the MHL, you jolly old elf!

I spent a while last night sorting out the data for tomorrow's Metro-Hudson League inaugural event. 125 novice LDers, for a start. There had been a glitch in tabroom’s data upload that CP fixed, so thankfully everything came in like a dream, except of course with this many people, name repetitions are rife, and they come in as XX and ZZ and the like. But it doesn’t take long to sort those out, as long as your remember to do it. Then, of course, there’s the dawdlers, who forget about the deadline. The thing is, one does do other things with one’s life other than sitting at the computer making your changes (although, I admit, between this blog and TVFT and Twitter and Facebook and whatnot, in my case it really doesn’t look like it, but I assure you that it’s true). There’s no penalty for lateness other than my giving you dirty looks. Some of them (the dawdlers, not the dirty looks) are honest, some of them are well-meaning, some of them are every single tournament, week after week after week. You know who you are, you spalpeen! Yeah, you. No, not that new coach down the street just figuring out the ropes. No, not that veteran who made an honest mistake. No, I mean YOU! AGAIN!

Aaaarrrghhhh!

By the way, O’C is terribly upset that the medals for tomorrow still say Mid-Hudson League instead of Metrosexual League. On the bright side, at least now we know that there is one person in the universe who, A) noticed that the medals for tomorrow still say Mid-Hudson League instead of Metrosexual League, and B) cares that the medals for tomorrow still say Mid-Hudson League instead of Metrosexual League. If O’C didn’t exist, I guess we’d have to invent him. (With minor modifications.)

The list function finally appeared on my Twitter page today. Thank goodness. I like following a lot of people, but there’s a difference between people I know and people who amuse me. (I amuse you? You think I’m funny?) Twitter lists (like FB lists) will allow me to sort them all out. Yesterday, for instance, I mistakenly sent a DJ tweet out through @debatetab instead of my DJ account. My initial inclination was to send another tweet disavowing the previous tweet, but that just compounds the error. Lists oughta help me here.

As one might expect, with prior knowledge of the players involved, my daughter’s comment yesterday on judges and yappy students cut to the chase. If you want the judge to talk, fine: the judge talks, the debaters zip it. ‘Nuff said. And to think, it took me about three blog posts to get to that. And I’m the one who condenses for a living. Jeesh.

Anyhow, tomorrow will be the usual comedy of novices bumping up against the walls for the day, parents realizing that jumping out the window won’t solve anything because they’re in the basement, Bronx toilets bubbling at right below the overflow stage—the full inaugural monty, so to speak. If I said I wasn’t looking forward to it, I’d be lying. Let the Metrosexual Debate Games begin!